By LAUREN RUSSELL- Bozeman Daily Chronicle Staff Writer
Summer season in YellowstoneNational Park lures visitors from all over the world with its spectacular wildlife and famous natural wonders, yet always leaves them grumbling about one thing -- traffic.
If Jeff Osgood of the Yellowstone Business Partnership has his way, the number of cars jamming the Grand Loop system may be greatly reduced. He envisions an innovative public transit system connecting the 27 counties of the tri-state Greater Yellowstone region.
The proposed regional transportation co-op would connect public and private transportation providers with visitors, employers and anyone else who wants a ride. The idea is to make travel easier for vacationers and business travelers with one-stop, online reservations, while also bringing more business to the area.
“The idea came up about a couple years ago when we asked, ‘What can we do to connect people in the region?” said Osgood, mobility project manager of the Yellowstone Business Partnership. “The first thing I thought, when I came on board, was, ‘Boy this thing seems simple, why hasn’t it been done before?’”
Ideally, a person could fly into Bozeman, Cody or Jackson, take a bus into Yellowstone or Grand Teton national park, then emerge on the other side and fly home relatively seamlessly, without long waits for connections.
But because the region is short on commercial air service and has a limited, fixed-route transit system, a car is usually the preferred mode of navigation for visitors.
“The regional focus, when you look at public transportation, is very limited to boundaries, like within the city of Bozeman or within Jackson, and we’re really trying to develop a hybrid system,” said David Kack, program manager of mobility and transportation for the Western Transportation Institute, a research group located at MSU.
PROBLEM SOLVING STAGE
The Yellowstone Business Partnership solicited help from a 50-person volunteer committee. Members included Kack, liaisons to state and federal agencies, including all three state transportation departments, YellowstoneNational Park and the U.S. Forest Service, and area businesses and interest groups.
The committee devised a model that is now being translated into a feasibility study, which Osgood said should be done by the end of the year.
The study is being funded with $200,000 of a $535,000 rural transit stimulus grant from the Idaho Transportation Department. Osgood said that if the study is successful, the remainder of the grant will be used for a pilot program next summer.
Estimates on the cost of the program won’t be available until Oct. 22 and infrastructure needs are still being determined, but Osgood said the primary focus will be coordinating a bus system throughout the area.
According to Kack, the more interests involved in the co-op, the better. Government would subsidize a significant portion of the program, with the remainder spread among employers ferrying workers to and from work, hotels, tour outfits and other interested parties.
“The more different groups you can get using that bus, it benefits all who use it, not just one group,” Kack said. “It helps tourists, helps locals, helps employees and business owners.”
Doug Wales, marketing director for Bridger Bowl ski area, said his involvement has been driven not only by a desire to make it easier for skiers to get to Bridger, but by a desire to see traffic reduced for the greater good of the region.
“The ultimate goal here is to have a very coordinated effort throughout the entire region, a centralized system so that we could coordinate between air, road, trains and buses so people can move in and throughout the area in an easier, more sustainable and more environmentally friendly way,” Wales said. “We want to see people be able to come into the region, but ideally using mass transit.”
YOSEMITE MODEL
A similar program has been operating in California since 2000. The Yosemite Area Regional Transportation System, or YARTS, is a cooperative agreement between YosemiteNational Park, the California Department of Transportation and Merced, Mono and Mariposa counties. The service provides two shuttles, one year-round and one seasonally, between the gateway communities of Yosemite and the park, which saw about 3.5 million visitors last year.
Dick Whittington, YARTS’ transit manager, said the co-op formed about 20 years ago, when Yosemite announced a plan to ban cars altogether from the park. That plan was eventually abandoned, but worries about congestion in the region, air quality and inadequate visitor parking led to the acknowledgment that the area needed some form of public transit.
“In California, we drive,” Whittington said. “We love our cars. Getting people out of cars and into public transit is a challenge.
“But we have people here who travel from outside the area, so public transit is perfect for them. People who come in rental cars aren’t allowed to put chains on those cars, so this is good for them. And about 35 percent of our total ridership is park employees, who commute from the surrounding counties.”
Between June 2008 and June 2009, YARTS carried 69,885 people, he said. In its 10-year run, the service has saved about 225,000 individual car trips.
One complication that YARTS didn’t have to deal with, but the Greater Yellowstone team will, is navigating the jurisdictional boundaries of the proposed area served, which in this case includes 27 county lines, three state lines and two national park boundaries.
Plus, there will be myriad other issues, from Yellowstone entrance fees to insurance coverage for transit providers.
“You’re dealing with three states, so a lot of it is going to be working through those regulations that’s going to be the biggest sticking point,” Kack said.
VALUE OF A GUIDE
But the potential benefits outweigh the sticking points, supporters say.
One less tangible benefit of a public transit system in a national park is the interactive experience visitors would have with rangers, other tourists and the park itself, said Jack Clarkson, owner of the Madison Arm Resort and a member of the project’s Intelligent Transportation Committee.
“The interpretative experience is something that people really miss when they go in with their individual cars,” Clarkson said. “They go in and ooh and ah because they saw a bear, but they didn’t know that people actually used to play in the mud at the Paint Pots, for instance. People don’t get a history of the park just driving around in their cars.”
As a business owner, Clarkson said he’d like to see Yellowstone’s gateway communities become sustainable transportation hubs. He’s full of ideas for the co-op, including duel-fuel-source vehicles, coaches powered by cleaner fuel, vehicles outfitted with OnStar capabilities to better coordinate tours, and recorded CDs of each individual tour for visitors to take home.
“Basically it’s about the triple bottom line—people, planet and profit,” Clarkson said. “If we’re satisfying the triple bottom line, making the visitors happy, saving the environment and making money, then we’re doing a good thing.”
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